Free Jazz: the apostles

The free-jazz revolution started at the turn of the decade with
Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and John Coltrane's
My Favorite Things (1960).
Coleman was a novice, Coltrane had played with Miles Davis. The zeitgeist
had in fact been created by Davis, and the generation that debuted in that
zeitgeist was eager to break with the rules of jazz harmony.

It took two giants (and probably more giants of composition than of
improvisation) to kick off the revolution, but a
"free" way of improvising was in the air after the experiments of cool jazz
and modal jazz. George Russell and Miles Davis had shown that there were
other ways for improvisers to improvise (and, although neglected at the time,
for composers to compose). Several musicians were informally playing a
much less organized music than the one that they were recording.
Ornette Coleman was the first one who had the guts to record it and boast
about it. It is not a coincidence that he grew in complete
isolation from the main centers of jazz.
Once the pioneers had dismantled the structure of jazz music, all the pieces
came tumbling down. The most severe blow was received by the rhythm section.
The traditional role of chordal instruments such as piano and guitar became
useless.
The bass and the drums were no longer time-keeping pulse-generating instruments
but free to bedevil the harmony with melodic abstractions and polyrhythms.
The idea was widely considered anathema by the generation that had been raised
listening to Louis Armstrong.

It took a few years for free jazz to be accepted by the jazz establishment,
that initially saw it as little more than an ephemeral novelty.
In 1964 Bill Dixon organized the "October Revolution in Jazz",
the first major festival for free jazz, held at the Cellar Cafe in Manhattan.
That could be considered the year when free jazz became a major force in jazz.

However, it was in continental Europe that free jazz was first recognized as a peak (not a bottom) in the history of jazz music. Jazz clubs in the USA still catered to an audience that was mainly looking for entertainment. When the protagonists of free jazz landed in Europe, they found an audience that was used to the avantgarde concerts of modern classical composers and had no difficulty appreciating even the boldest forms of free jazz.
John Coltrane was booed in Britain in 1961,
but the tours of
Cecil Taylor (1962),
Archie Shepp (1963),
Don Cherry (1964),
Albert Ayler (1964) and finally Ornette Coleman (1965)
in continental Europe
did much more than inspire local scenes: they gave these USA musicians the confidence that they needed.

Free jazz erupted at about the same time that the civil-rights movement
was staging its biggest demonstrations. Hard boppers such as Sonny Rollins
had already introduced heavy doses of political awareness into jazz.
Free jazz musicians rediscovered the West African roots of jazz, not in their
sound (that was, ultimately, as European as possible) but in their
identification with the sorrow and the rebellion of their ancestors.

On another level the movement for political liberation transformed into
an unrelated movement for liberating music from its dogmas.
It was as if the frustrated energy of the political liberation movement
transferred into the unbound energy of the musical liberation movement.

In a way, free jazz was the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance for black
musicians of the USA.
Free jazz was about the Artist not the conventions. The Artist was entitled
to ignore the conventions of tempo, tonality and consonance.
The Artist was free to use multiple tempi, to have no tonal center and to
use "notes" that did not belong to the classical scale.
Each musician set up her or his own rules within anarchic framework, based
not on the prevailing artistic dogma but on the emotions that she or he
wanted to express.

Swing was a music of drums that kept the 4/4 tempo, melodies borrowed from catchy pop music, harmony that was tonal, improvisation that was restrained,
meant for partying
and performed by orchestras with the traditional division in three sections.
Bebop was a music of percussion that contributed to the timbral sound, melodies that were convoluted, harmony that bordered on the atonal,
meant for touching
and performed by small combos.
Free jazz was a music of polyrhythmic and improvising percussion, melodies that were warped and devastated, harmony that was frequently atonal,
meant for thinking
and performed by musicians pushing the limits of their instruments.

There had been experiments of "free jazz" before Coltrane and Coleman, notably
Lennie Tristano's Descent Into Maelstrom and Stan Kenton's City
Of Glass; and similar rebellions against traditional harmony were
ubiquitous among contemporary classical composers. However, Coltrane and
Coleman were black, not white. They injected into "free jazz" a different
spirit of rebellion, one that was inevitably grounded in the racial tensions
of those times. "Free" jazz happened at the same time that "freedom" was
becoming the slogan for an increasing bitter confrontation with the white
Establishment. Free jazz and the civil-rights movement grew in parallel.
Free jazz was a new kind of music, but it was also, to some extent, a
musical metaphor for the other kind of freedom, in the sociopolitical dimension.

Both white and black intellectuals got involved in the civil-rights movement,
but their musical correlates were of a wildly different nature. The musical
reaction of white intellectuals was the generation of folksingers such as
Bob Dylan, emerging mainly from the Greenwich Village of New York.
The musical reaction of black intellectuals was the generation of free-jazz
musicians who reinterpreted Coltrane's and Coleman's innovations in a
politicized context. They too were based in the Greenwich Village, and
their lofts were favorite hang-outs for white intellectuals too. Despite the
common cause and common geography, though, the two musical currents diverged
in spirit and form. White folksingers were preaching, focusing on words.
Black free-jazz musicians were not using words at all, just extreme instrumental
music.

At the same time, free jazz represented a break with the past of black music.
While previous stylistic revolutions in jazz had been carried out by musicians
who had been raised in the previous style, free jazz was largely the outcome
of a brand new generation of musicians, with little or no ties to bebop or
cool jazz. They came out of nowhere, with a style that did not so much
attack the dogmas of the previous generation (as bebop had done) as ignore
them. The whole idea of the virtuoso player, of the improvisation on a pop
standard, of the entertainer were thrown out of the window.

In fact, free jazz was not accepted by the jazz establishment. Most jazz
musicians continued to refine their old style, ignoring and sometimes
lampooning free jazz.
The apostles of free jazz had to cope with a degree of negative feedback from
their own community that was unprecedented in black music.

Not all of them were "free" the same way, actually. "Free" jazz was a label
applied to musicians who downplayed the conventions of jazz improvisation,
i.e. the elements providing for stability during an improvisation
(the chord progressions or the tempo or the key). But little of their music
was atonal or chaotic. Many of them played ballads and blues dirges.
What they had in common was the belief that jazz music could and should explore
a broader range of sounds and of combinations of sounds. Often those premises
were a pretext for high-energy collective improvisations rather than for
a truly self-consistent aesthetic.
(Thus the decline of the piano, an instrument that was perceived to be unfit
for wild improvisation).
Despite its obvious contrast with the hard-bop, the bebop and the cool jazz
that preceded it, free-jazz actually continued the same trend away from
the melodic and rhythmic art of the progenitors and towards a more and more
textural art.
"Free" jazz was, ultimately, more the name of an era, a movement and a mood
than the name of a specific technique.

In the midst of the blossoming of the free-jazz scene, pianist
Cecil Taylor
probably represented better than anyone else the non-jazz aspect of the
movement.
Many of the innovations of the 1960s were pioneered by his records.
His fusion of exuberance and atonality was particularly influential.
A graduate from the New England Conservatory of Music (1951-1955), where he had studied contemporary classical music, Taylor developed a radical improvising
style at the piano that indulged in tone clusters, percussive attacks and
irregular polyrhythmic patterns, a very "physical" style that required a manic
energy during lengthy and frenzied performances,
a somewhat "cacophonous" style that relished both atonal and tonal passages.
The dynamic range of his improvisations was virtually infinite.
His maturation took place via Charge 'Em Blues, off Jazz Advance (december 1955), for his first quartet, featuring white soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Dennis Charles,
the convoluted, tonally ambiguous Tune 2 off At Newport (july 1956) for the same quartet,
Toll (the blueprint for many of his classics),
Of What and Excursion on a Wobbly Rail, off Looking Ahead (june 1958), with Lacy replaced by vibraphonist Earl Griffith,
Little Lees and Matie's Trophies, off Love for Sale (april 1959), with trumpeter Ted Curson, saxophonist Bill Barron and the usual rhythm section,
Air and E.B., off The World of Cecil Taylor (october 1960),
featuring Archie Shepp on tenor saxophone and the same rhythm section,
the abstract Cell Walk For Celeste, off New York City R&B (january 1961), also for the quartet of Taylor, Shepp, Charles and Neidlinger (to whom the album was credited),
Mixed, off Gil Evans' Into The Hot (october 1961), featuring the brand new line-up of altoist Jimmy Lyons, tenorist Archie Shepp, bassist Henry Grimes, drummer Sunny Murray, trumpeter Ted Curson and trombonist Roswell Rudd.
These albums were still anchored to the song format and wasted time on other people's material when Taylor's own compositions were so much superior; but
occasionally the pianist and his cohorts launched into strident, torrential
jamming that obliterated the history of jazz.
Taylor's group was much bolder in their live performances, when they indulged in lengthy improvisations in front of an audience that still thought of jazz as light entertainment.
Taylor's compositions at their best were wildly irregular and casually nonchalant at the same time. They were bold contradictions. Sometimes dramatic and sometimes sarcastic, they straddled the line between being and not being.
At the same time, pieces such as Tune 2, Toll, Air, Cell Walk For Celeste and Mixed displayed the formalist concern typical of classical music.
Taylor's first major statement came with the live trio performances of
Nefertiti the Beautiful One Has Come (november 1962), featuring
Jimmy Lyons on alto and Sunny Murray on drums (the Unit), two ideal complements for
Taylor's explosive style. These lengthy and complex jams,
Trance, Lena, Nefertiti The Beautiful One Has Come and the 21-minute colossus D Trad That's What,
were as uncompromising as Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (1960) and
John Coltrane's Impressions (1961).
In fact, they were so uncompromising that very few people listened to them.
It took three years for Taylor to release another album, and it presented
a larger ensemble and an even wilder sound, as violent as garage-rock,
bordering on hysteria: Unit Structures (may 1966) featured (mostly) a septet with Lyons, Eddie Gale Stevens on trumpet, Ken McIntyre on alto sax, oboe and bass clarinet, two bassists (Henry Grimes and Alan Silva) and Andrew Cyrille on drums.
These pieces (or, better, "structures") were conceived as sequences of polyphonic events rather than, say, series of variations on a theme.
Nonetheless, Unit Structure, Enter Evening and Steps were
highly structured compositions, and therein lied Taylor's uniqueness:
his "free jazz" was also "free" of the melodrama that permeated Coltrane's and
Coleman's music. Despite all the furor, Taylor's music always sounded firmly
under the control of a cold intelligence.
Cyrille's drumming was less abstract than Murray, more integrated with the other players, but Silva now played the "decorative" role that Murray used to play.
The sextet of Conquistador (october 1966), featuring Bill Dixon on trumpet, Lyons, and the same three-piece rhythm section, pushed the experiment to its limits in two shockingly abrasive and expressionistic side-long jams, Conquistador and With. Their sheer size challenged the balance between disintegration and integration, looseness and cohesiveness, that constituted the soul of the previous "structures". The flow of enigmatic sounds had become a puzzle to be reconstructed.
A quartet of Taylor, Lyons, Silva and Cyrille recorded Student Studies: (november 1966), containing the 27-minute Student Studies, the 20-minute Amplitude and the 12-minute Niggle Feuigle, that stepped back a bit from the edge, emphasizing the structure behind the chaos, the "jazz" soul hidden under the apparently dissolute dissonance.
However, Taylor's music was still under-appreciated and he had to spend the
next seven years virtually in exile.
During this period Taylor composed/improvised some of his most daring music:
the four-movement Praxis (july 1968) for solo piano, released in 1982,
the six-movement Second Act Of A (july 1969), for a quartet with Lyons, Cyrille and soprano saxophonist Sam Rivers,
the three-movement Indent (march 1973) for solo piano, released on Mysteries,
the 81-minute Bulu Akisakila Kutala (may 1973) for a trio with Lyons and Cyrille, released on Akisakila (1973).
Solo (May 1973), his first collection of solo-piano pieces, presented Taylor's "layering" technique in its most sophisticated version. The organized improvisations of Choral of Voice, Lono, Asapk in Ame and especially Indent were emblematic of the process of cooperation and competition of events operating at different levels.
Spring of Two Blue J's (november 1973) contained two versions of the piece, one solo and one for a quartet with Lyons, Cyrille and bassist Sirone. The solo version delivered his most emotional outpour yet.
This period culminated in the five loud and noisy movements of the live solo-piano suite Silent Tongues (july 1974): Abyss, Petals & Filaments (combined into one 18-minute track), Jitney (18 minutes), Crossing (18 minutes divided into two tracks) and After all (ten minutes).
This album was a compendium of Taylor's aesthetic, secreting an unlikely synthesis of the irrational and the rational that had been the contradicting pillars of his music. Its range of moods defied the laws of psychoanalysis.
The sound was emblematic of his brilliant exuberance but was soon surpassed
in intensity by at least two (clearly much more improvised) performances:
the 62-minute Streams and Chorus of Seed (june 1976), released on Dark To Themselves, for a quintet with Lyons, trumpeter Raphe Malik, drummer Marc Edwards and tenor saxophonist David Ware,
and the 76-minute solo-piano Air Above Mountains (august 1976).
Here the music was meant to exhaust the performer, to last until it had drained every gram of psychological and physical energy out of the performer.
But these live juggernauts also marked the end of the "underground" period
and the beginning of a three-year artistic bonanza.
A sextet of Taylor, Lyons, trumpeter Raphe Malik, violinist Ramsey Ameen, bassist Norris "Sirone" Jones and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson delivered the
more structured and variegated jams of Cecil Taylor Unit (april 1978): the 14-minute Idut, the 14-minute Serdab, the 30-minute Holiday En Masque,
and the 57-minute 3 Phasis (april 1978).
A similar sextet with Lyons, Ameen, Alan Silva on bass and cello and both Jerome Cooper and Sunny Murray on drums, recorded the 69-minute Is it the Brewing Luminous (february 1980).
Despite the monumental proportions, this music was less magniloquent and
less mysterious than the music of the 1960s.
Starting with the quartet effort Calling it the 8th (november 1981), featuring
Lyons, bassist William Parker and drummer Rashid Bakr (all of them doubling on voice),
and the solo Garden (november 1981), Taylor increased the production values to emphasize the nuances of his playing, adopted a jazzier style and added his poetry to the music (not a welcomed addition).
A new prolific phase of his career yielded recordings for ensemble, such as
Winged Serpent (october 1984) and
the 48-minute Legba Crossing (july 1988);
for solo piano, such as For Olim (april 1986), containing the 18-minute title-track, the 71-minute title-track of Erzulie Maketh Scent (july 1988) and the 72-minute The Tree of Life (march 1991), perhaps the most austere of his life;
and for small groups, such as Olu Iwa (april 1986), containing the 48-minute B Ee Ba Nganga Ban'a Eee for piano, trombone, tenor sax and rhythm section, and the 27-minute Olu Iwa for piano and rhythm section, the precursor of his many piano and drums duets, as well as
the 61-minute The Hearth (june 1988), for a trio with saxophonist Evan Parker and cellist Tristan Honsinger, and
Looking (november 1989) and Celebrated Blazons (june 1990) for the trio with bassist William Parker and drummer Tony Oxley.
The best fusion of his visceral and romantic sides was perhaps achieved on Always A Pleasure (april 1993), a live workshop (Longineu Parsons on trumpet, Harri Sjoestroem on soprano sax, Charles Gayle on tenor sax, Tristan Honsinger on cello, Sirone on bass, Rashid Bakr on drums).
Taylor represented everything that Coleman stood against: he had studied
composition (Coleman was illiterate) and he was inspired by atonal music
(Coleman harked back to older black music). Coleman approached dance music
from the viewpoint of the disco. Taylor's music was frequently compared (by
himself) to classical ballet. Even the mood was opposite: Taylor's music was
an atomic bomb compared to Coleman's passion.

One of the key legacies of free jazz was to dispose of the cliches of how
a jazz band should work. Previous changes had been incremental, but the
free-jazz generation introduced revolutionary changes.
Ornette Coleman got rid of the piano.
Cecil Taylor played with no bass.
The drums were still pervasive, but they were no longer mere time-keeping devices.
And the first Art Ensemble of Chicago had no drummer at all.
Soon there were ensembles with more strings than horns, or with no horns at all.
Free jazz was more than a Copernican revolution: it was the musical equivalent
of the French revolution.